Monday, July 16, 2012

Live into the darkness

One morning not long ago, two of my morning readings (Rachel
Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom and
Mastin Kipp’s daily blog, The Daily Love)
were about the power of darkness. I’ve been feeling the darkness nipping at my
heels the last several days –not the suffocating darkness of depression—rather
the soft, blanketing darkness of grief and loneliness. My mother’s death,
followed closely by the death of a friend, has left a gaping hole in my life.

But this darkness isn’t a yawing pit of blackness,
threatening to overwhelm or swallow me. It is no threat to my existence and I
don’t need to fix it. Quite the opposite.

Darkness can be a place of healing, growth, and
transformation. Babies are formed in darkness. Caterpillars are transformed
within the silent darkness of the cocoon to become butterflies. Wounds, beneath
their dressings, mend in darkness.

When I began a journey of recovery from childhood trauma, I
had to head home after each meeting with my therapist to rest. This was in the
beginning, when I was first allowing my painful truth to unfold. My mind and
spirit were both exhausted at the end of each session from the effort of
telling the story.

Arriving home, I would wrap myself in the fluffy comfort of
my duvet and recover in its welcome. My therapist, with good reason, called
this “cocooning” and said that it is necessary for healing.

This was my introduction to the idea of valid gentleness and
rest; to the truth that the darkness can be soft, safe, renewing.

Yet, this place of darkness is not passive. It is where
active recovery is at work. Think for a moment of REM sleep. We lie in
darkness, our bodies resting and recovering from the busyness of our lives,
while our brains are active, processing our experience and setting our minds in
order through our dream life. All while in darkness.

I am learning to not resist the darkness but to move toward
it, allowing myself to rest and recover. This is a rare thing in this
over-scheduled, constantly plugged-in, frantically busy world. But it is a
gift, spouting from the fire hose, blessed darkness to be quiet and simply be.